Taking tea with new PM the morning after

By Peter Calder

In the sunroom of her modest cream and green Mt Eden villa, crowded with three generations of family, the Prime Minister-elect is, at first glance, hard to pick out.

She is the one with the outsize mug with "Helen" glazed on its side, but she sits by the kitchen door on the fringes of the chattering group; the latest visitor, her deputy Michael Cullen, occupies the guest's pride of place on the cane sofa.

Tea is in that mug, not coffee. Although she has had only four hours' sleep, the woman who by her own admission sleeps "a lot when I get the chance to" says she is feeling pretty refreshed.

She will tell you she is not averse to a glass of good local sauvignon blanc but as the party faithful drank to her health until the small hours, Helen Clark "didn't drink a thing all night."

"I needed to have a good, clear head today," she says.

The room is full of that sweetly satisfied morning-after feeling as Helen Clark has a few hours with her family before heading off to a meeting with her coalition partner, Alliance leader Jim Anderton.

Her parents, three sisters, a niece and a nephew bask with her in the realisation that nine years in opposition have come to an end. At last, they say, there is a Prime Minister in the family.

Outside on the deck, Helen Clark professes herself entirely undaunted by the task ahead, which she will take "one step after another."

Perhaps ruefully, the 49-year-old says: "It's not as though it has come early in my political career," but for all that she makes light of her tag as the country's first elected woman Prime Minister.

"I don't think it's an issue any more," she says. "It was really hard getting established as a woman leader of a major party.

"That three years was a shocker, the hardest three years I've ever had, even harder than my first three years as an MP which weren't exactly a picnic.

"When the National Party elected a woman leader, in a sense that was very helpful because it took away gender as an issue."

Helen Clark does not expect the new job to keep her away from her Auckland home much more than the old one did. Her husband, Peter Davis, a professor of public health in Christchurch, is away each Tuesday to Friday, but they still plan to spend weekends together.

Never mind the nervousness of the diplomatic protection squad, she says: "I've got an Auckland electorate, and Auckland's a third of the country."

And, yes, she will move into Premier House, the PM's official and recently refurbished Wellington residence.

"I'll rattle around in there a bit, I suppose. But I have the occasional boarder. [Former Governor-General Dame] Cath Tizard boarded with me a bit in my flat in Tinakori Rd - in much more modest surroundings."

Today is day one for the new Prime Minister and she says she will be heading for Wellington on a morning plane.

"But not too early," she says, in what may be a veiled warning to earlybird bureaucrats. "I'm not a morning person."